Money and the imagined nation state
Posted on February 05, 2003 @ 13:43 in Research
In Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson discusses the different processes and factors that contributed to the rise of the nation state. He argues that shared conceptions of time, the printing press, 'official' languages and the school system made it possible for the individual to imagine and thus to understand an unknowable amount of people on a largely untraveled territory as a community, as a nation. One of the arguments he make is about the rather arbitrary nature in which these signifiers are made (and understood) to stand for particular conceptions of the state.
The national currency as materialized in banknotes and coins, I suppose, is also one of those signifiers that both expresses and constitutes the nation state as a nation state. There's American money, English money, Chinese money... and until not too long ago there was a whole bunch of different European countries' currencies. A lot of the Dutch loved their colorful and daringly designed banknotes, and hated to see it go in favor of the bland and drab Euro-money.
Still, it doesn't seem that the understanding of The Netherlands as a nation has been significantly dimished by the disappearance of its national currency -- well, in the short run, anyway. Wouldn't it be a great study to research if and how the disappearance of the national currency has impacted the imagination and understanding of the nation state among the European citizens who've lost their national currencies? Are there ways in which the loss is compensated? Is the nation state reimagined because of the loss? Intriguing questions... somebody, somewhere is probably already hard at work trying to answer them.
Comments and Trackbacks
No comments or trackbacks for this entry yet.
Post a comment
Comments and trackbacks have been closed on this site. My apologies.
Since MT-Blacklist inexplicably stopped working I had no other recourse than close comments and trackbacks to stop the spam. I've been meaning to correct this for quite a while, but life got in the way... in a good way I should add.